Page 76 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

64 JORGE LARRAIN

ideology, and therefore Marx’s concept, is certainly inadequate to account
for the formation, articulation and transformation of discourses, currents of
thought, political ideas, in short, ideologies in the neutral sense. But then it
was not produced to perform that task, but to criticize certain distortions.
What is to be lamented is the fact that these two aspects, which are
different and must be complementary, should dispute over the same concept
of ideology. In fact they operate with totally different logics. Ideally, the
concept of ideology should be restricted to only one of them, to avoid
confusions. But what is behind the alternative concept must be maintained.
This is ultimately the reason why both the negative and the neutral
concept of ideology have persisted within the marxist tradition; they both
perform necessary tasks within social science: one seeks critically to pass
judgement on the attempted justifications and concealment of undesirable
and contradictory social situations; the other seeks to provide an account
of how certain political discourses in search of hegemony are constructed
and reconstructed, expand or contract, gain ascendancy or lose it. I defend
the importance of Marx’s negative concept but I can see the value of the
neutral concept, especially in its Gramscian variety. The contributions of
the early Laclau and Hall to our understanding of Thatcherism have been
absolutely crucial. Unfortunately many authors using the neutral concept
do not accept that there could be two different concepts in the marxist
tradition which perform different tasks. 6 Hall’s position among them is
unique because of his attempt to prove that Marx’s concept does not work
in practice when applied to Thatcherism. After trying to show that Hall was
really criticizing a leninist version of ideology and not Marx’s concept as I
understand it, it is necessary for me to address the question as to whether
Marx’s concept of ideology can be used to analyse Thatcherism.

THATCHERISM AND THE NEGATIVE CONCEPT OF
IDEOLOGY
For a critical conception of ideology it is not enough to be able to account
for the successful way in which Thatcherite ideology has been able to
articulate the interests of a wide variety of groups and sections of British
society, it is necessary to show, critically, its shortcomings and
inadequacies. Otherwise the analysis could easily become a political
celebration of the achievements of Thatcherism. This criticism has been
levelled at Hall’s work by Jessop and other collaborators (1984) and Hall
has replied to it that he never said that Thatcherism had achieved
hegemony, that he contrasted its ideological success with its economic
failures and that he did not treat Thatcherism as ideologically monolithic,
but fully acknowledged its contradictions (Hall, 1985). Hall’s defence
makes sense. The acknowledgement of the fact that the hegemonic project
of Thatcherism contrasts with the lack of hegemonic drive of ‘both the